Katrakis's Last Mistress

by Caitlin Crews

  But then she had fallen madly in love with Peter Barbery, and had sealed all of their fates.

  Nikos let his hands rest on the rail in front of him, and forced himself to breathe. What was done was done, and there could be no undoing it. Peter had tossed Althea aside the moment Gustave Barbery had succeeded in cheating Demetrios out of a major deal. The entire Katrakis legacy had faltered. Althea had killed herself, and when it was found that she had been pregnant, Demetrios had blamed Nikos even more. For failing to protect her and the child? For surviving? Nikos had never known. A year later, Demetrios, too, had died, leaving Nikos to pick up the pieces of the Katrakis shipping empire.

  It had all happened so fast. He had only just found his family, and the Barberys had ripped them away from him, one by one.

  What was done was done, he repeated to himself. And what would be, would be. He had vowed it over his father’s grave, and he was a man who kept his promises. Always.

  But still, he did not feel that surge of cold certainty that had led him here. That focus and intensity that had allowed him to plot and plan from afar, across years. Was it because, as a little voice in the back of his head insisted, doing what he planned to do to Tristanne made him exactly like Peter Barbery? Worse, even—for Barbery had promised Althea nothing, while Nikos had every intention of abandoning Tristanne at the altar.

  He could see it play out in his mind’s eye, shot for shot, like he watched it in the cinema. Tristanne would walk down the aisle, dressed in something white and gauzy and ineffably lovely, and he would not be there. He would never be there. She would not cry, not in front of so many. He knew that the fact she’d cried in front of him tonight meant things he was unwilling to look at closely. But she would not cry in her moment of greatest humiliation. He could see, as if she stood before him, that strong chin rise into the air, and the tremor across her lips that she suppressed in an instant. He saw the smooth, calm expression she turned toward the crowd, toward the cameras, toward the gossip and the speculation.

  And he saw the great bleakness in her chocolate eyes, that he feared she would never be rid of again.

  He hissed out a harsh curse and let the night wind toss it toward the rocks far below, battering it into a million pieces.

  This was different, he told himself fiercely. He had never intended to use Tristanne; she had approached him. How was he to refuse to use the perfect tool when it fell into his lap? After all this time? He thought of that odd, tender moment in the rain in Florence. He had been trying to forget it ever since it had happened. He was not like Peter Barbery, he told himself, even though he had the strangest feeling that when he did this thing to Tristanne, when he wounded her so deeply, so irrevocably—it might even wound him, too.

  He, who had shut off that part of himself so long ago now that it was almost shocking to recall how much he had loved his spoiled, careless half sister, and how much it had hurt when she’d thrown that in his face. He had never thought anything could hurt him again.

  “You are nothing to me!” she’d screamed at him when he’d attempted to console her after Peter’s vicious termination of their relationship. He had not known, then, that she was pregnant. That Peter Barbery had scoffed at her and called her a whore—then claimed his own child could have been anyone’s. All Nikos had known was that Althea had been in a lump on the floor of her room in their father’s elegant mansion in Kifissia, her face streaked with tears. Still, her eyes, as they focused on him, were narrow and mean. Like their father’s.

  “Althea,” he had said, his hands in the air, trying to soothe her. He had thought he had shown her that he was trustworthy—the older brother she had never had. Someone she could love and lean on. That was what he’d wanted.

  “I wish you had never been born!” she had thrown at him, cutting him as surely as if she’d thrown a knife. “This is your fault! You were the one who was too cocky, too sure—”

  “I will make this right,” he had promised her. “I will. I swear it on my honor.”

  “Your honor? What is that to me?” She had been scornful then, her pretty face twisted, spiteful. “You may have climbed out of the sewer, Nikos, but you still walk around with the stench of it clinging to you, don’t you? And you always will!”

  Nikos shook the unpleasant memory away, gritting his teeth. Only a week later, she had been gone, her pregnancy uncovered. So much lost. So much wasted.

  The Barberys deserved whatever they got, even Tristanne, the innocent one. He would not feel guilty for it.

  He would not.

  She was still half-asleep when he pulled her into his arms. Tristanne came awake as his body moved over hers, her own already responding to him, already softening for him, before she was fully aware of what was happening.

  “You have yet to answer me,” he said softly, moving his mouth along the column of her neck. “I presume this is merely an oversight.”

  “What if my answer remains no?” she said, her voice husky from sleep, and, she thought, the fact that no secrets remained between them. Not any longer. She felt…naked unto her soul. New.

  Vulnerable.

  A faint memory stirred then, of Peter in Florence, asking snidely after Nikos’s angle in all of this. She shook it away, concentrating instead on the feel of Nikos’s hard muscles beneath her hands, his hot mouth against her skin, her breast. What could she do? She had told him everything. She could only hope that he would do her the same courtesy—but even if he did not, it was not as if she could simply decide to stop loving him in the meantime.

  Her body would not allow her to stop wanting him, not even for the barest moment.

  “Yes,” she said, as he twisted his hips slightly and thrust deep into her, making her sigh with wonder at the perfect, slick fit.

  “Yes, what?” he taunted her as, slowly, he began to move, stroking in and out of her, sending shivers of delight all through her limbs.

  “You are a bully,” she said, gasping.

  “I am merely emphatic,” he growled against her throat, nipping at her. “And very, very focused.”

  And because she could do nothing else, because ripples of pleasure fogged her brain and coursed through her veins, she wrapped her legs around him and held on tight.

  His eyes were dark, threaded through with gold, and yet seemed almost conflicted as they met hers. He dropped his gaze, and kissed her, taking her mouth with an intensity she might have called desperate in another man. He began to thrust faster, harder, holding her bottom in his strong hands to please them both with the deeper angle.

  “Yes,” she said, because she could not remember, now, why she had denied him. She wanted to soothe him, to ease the darkness in his gaze. She wanted. “I will marry you.”

  He did not speak again. He merely lowered his head, and then he took them both over the edge.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “WE MUST marry quickly,” Nikos said the following evening as they sat in the fading light, startling Tristanne as she feasted on tangy kalamata olives and sharp feta drenched in locally grown olive oil and spices. The sun had only just ducked below the horizon, and Nikos had only just returned from another day in Athens.

  Part of her, she realized now, had wondered if the events of the previous night were real—of if she’d dreamed them. His words sent a thrill of anticipation through her.

  “Why must we do anything of the kind?” she asked. “Surely we can have the usual engagement period. We would not want to suggest that there is any reason to rush, would we?”

  “Will this turn into another battle, Tristanne?” he asked, his mouth curving into that familiar half smile, though there was a hardness to it tonight. “Will you explain to me what will and will not happen, at great length, only to acquiesce to my wishes in the end? Is that not the pattern?”

  She wished there was not that edge to his voice, as if he meant his words on several levels she could not quite understand. She wished she did not feel slapped down, somehow. But she reminded herself that ev
erything between them was different now. She had come clean and even so, he wanted to marry her.

  Or so she kept telling herself, as if it were a mantra.

  “Why do you wish to marry quickly?” she asked calmly, as if she had not noticed any edge, or even his usual sardonic inflection.

  His dark eyes touched on hers, then dropped to caress her lips, then her breasts beneath the light cotton shift she wore. She ordered herself not to squirm in her seat; not to respond. Her body, as ever, reacted only to Nikos and ignored her entirely.

  “Must you ask?” His voice was low. “Can you not tell?”

  “I do not believe in divorce,” she said quietly, holding his gaze when he looked at her again. She did not know why she felt compelled to say such a thing, even while her heart fluttered wildly in her chest. “I realize it is unfashionable to say so, but I have never understood the point of getting married at all if one does so with an escape clause.”

  “I assure you, divorce exists.” He shook his head, and reached for one of the spicy olives. He popped it into his mouth. “My grandfather divorced three wives in his time.”

  “Especially not if there are children,” she continued, ignoring him. She shrugged. “I have seen too many children destroyed in their parents’ petty little wars. I could not do that to my own.”

  Something in his gaze went electric then, making her breath catch.

  “If there are children,” he said quietly, fiercely, “they will be born with my name and live under my protection. Always.”

  He did not speak for a long while then, looking out to sea instead. Something about the remoteness of his expression made her heart ache for him, for the abandoned child he had been, though she dared not express her sympathy. She was too worried he would read into it what should not be there—her unreasonable empathy, her compassion, the love she felt for him that scared her, on some level, with its absoluteness. Its certainty. It was a hard rock of conviction inside of her, for all that so much about him remained a mystery—as out of reach as the stars that shone ever brighter above her in the darkening sky.

  Was it love? she wondered. Or was she deluding herself in a different way now? First she had thought she could maneuver around this man, use him for her own ends. That had proved laughable. Now she thought she could love him and make a marriage between them work based on only her love, and their breathtaking, consuming chemistry? Was she as foolish as the waves in the sea far below her, thinking they would remain intact as they threw themselves upon the rocks?

  Did she really want to know?

  “We will marry in two weeks,” he said at last. His head turned toward her, his expression almost grim. “Here. If that suits you.”

  “Are you asking my opinion?” she asked dryly, as if things were as they’d used to be between them. As if he was not so stern, suddenly—so unapproachable. “How novel.”

  “If you have another preference, you need only make it known.” His brows rose a fraction. “I have already notified the local paper. The announcement will be made in tomorrow’s edition. Everything else can be expedited.”

  “Two weeks,” she repeated, wishing she could see behind the distant expression he wore like a mask tonight. Her intuition hummed, whispering that something was not as it ought to be, but she dismissed it. Nerves, she thought. His as well as hers, perhaps. And well she should be nervous, marrying such a man. He would bulldoze right over her, if she showed the slightest weakness. He might do it anyway. He was doing it now.

  And yet some primitive part of her thrilled to the challenge of it. To the challenge of him. Even this somber version of him. What did that say about her?

  “Two weeks,” he said, as if confirming a deal. He settled back against his chair, and picked up his ever-present mobile. “Perhaps you should take the helicopter into Athens and find yourself something to wear.”

  “Perhaps I will,” she agreed, and picked up another crumbled-off piece of the feta, letting the sharp bite of it explode on her tongue. No matter how spicy, or sharp, she always went back for more. She could not fail to make the obvious connection. Perhaps, she thought with some mixture of despair and humor, that was simply who she was.

  She did not notice, until much later, that he had not told her why he wanted to marry so quickly. That he had talked around it entirely.

  Everything seemed to speed up then, making Tristanne feel almost dizzy. Soon they would be married, she told herself, and they would have the rest of their lives to sort through whatever lay beneath his sudden remoteness. She told herself that this was simply the male version of jitters—and at least her focus on what Nikos was or was not feeling, or how he was behaving, allowed her to avoid focusing on the things she did not want to think about.

  He was busy all the time, he claimed. He was always on his mobile, talking fiercely in Greek. When he found time to speak to her, it was to confirm that she was tending to the wedding details he had given over to her. She found a simple dress in a boutique in Athens, as directed. She met with a woman in the capitol city of Argostoli on the island who bubbled over with joy at finding the perfect flowers for Nikos’s bride.

  She contacted her family. Vivienne, predictably, was overjoyed—her enthusiasm not quite hiding the tremor in her voice, though she tried.

  “That is how it was for your father and me,” she said with a happy sigh. “We took one look at each other and everything else was inevitable.”

  Tristanne could not reconcile the cold parent Gustave had been with the stories her mother told of him, but she did not argue. Once her mother arrived, she would be safe. And soon, Tristanne had no doubt, well. It was all as she’d planned, back when she’d believed she could manipulate Nikos to her will.

  “You must come to Greece,” she said softly. “We cannot marry without you.”

  Peter, of course, was more difficult, even after she had the pleasure of telling him she no longer required his help in any respect—that he could keep her trust fund for the next three years, with her compliments.

  “You’ve upped the ante, haven’t you?” He sneered into the phone. “How proud you must be of yourself. I had no idea you could make a man like Katrakis turn his thoughts to matrimony. What a perfect little actress you are!”

  “You are, in point of fact, my only sibling,” Tristanne said coldly. “That is the only reason I am extending an invitation.”

  “That and the fact it would look powerfully odd if I did not attend,” Peter shot back. “Never fear, Tristanne. I will be there.”

  She rather thought that sounded like a threat.

  But there was no time to worry about Peter and whatever new atrocity he might be planning. Tristanne was infinitely more concerned about her husband-to-be, whose demeanor seemed to grow colder and more unapproachable by the hour as the clock ticked down to their wedding day.

  If it were not for the nights, she would have panicked. But he came to her in the darkness, without fail. She would lie awake until his dark form appeared, crawling over her on the wide bed. Silent and commanding, he made love to her with a fierce urgency that she felt sear her all the way to her soul. He held her in the aftermath, close to his chest, his hands tangled in her hair, and he never said a word.

  She should talk to him, she reasoned in the light of day. She should interrupt one of his interminable business calls and ask him what was bothering him. She would have, she told herself, were she not able to perfectly envision the kind of mocking set-down he might deliver. He was not the kind of man who could be asked about his feelings. She was not even certain if he was aware that he had any.

  The truth was, she missed him. She missed his teasing, their sparring—that half smile of his and the gleam of old coin gold in his dark eyes—but the sudden stiffness between them felt precarious, like something fragile stretched across a great morass of darkness. Tristanne was afraid to poke at it.

  That was the real reason, of course, she admitted to herself only when she was standing alone with the Greek sun
light drenching her in its shine. She was terrified that if she mentioned anything—anything at all—he would think better about all the ways she had deceived him and change his mind. And she could not bear to think of losing him.

  It was as simple—as wretchedly, starkly simple—as that.

  She could not imagine a day without his touch, without looking at that hard, beautiful face. Without seeing those deep gold eyes, those haughty cheekbones. Without feeling the heat of that steely chest. She did not want to imagine it.

  She knew that she should loathe herself for falling so hard, so heedlessly—for risking so much. For being, as Peter had always told her, so very like her poor mother. But try as she might, she could not seem to gain the necessary distance. It was as she’d sensed it would be from the start. Perhaps as she’d imagined when he’d left her breathless at that ball so long ago. The moment she’d let her defenses down, and let him in, she had been forever altered. She wanted him more, it seemed, than she wanted to keep herself safe.

  She could only hope she would not have to choose between the two.

  It was like déjà vu.

  Nikos stood on the deck of his yacht and watched the well-dressed and well-preserved guests mingle with each other in front of him. He, too, was dressed exquisitely in a beautifully tailored Italian suit, as befitted the host and the bridegroom on the night before his wedding was supposed to take place. But he could not seem to pay the proper amount of attention to his business associates or the expected luminaries who milled about, drinking his wine and laughing too loudly into the coming evening. He could not even pay his respects to the coast of his beloved Kefallonia as the boat slowly moved past this stunning cliff, that hidden gem of a beach and yet another picturesque village. It was all a blur to him.